1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a public TV (television) telephone terminal, and more specifically it is related to a TV telephone terminal installed in a telephone booth and which receives calls from TV telephones of general subscribers, a movable camera installed in the telephone booth being remotely controlled from the TV telephone of the general subscriber to obtain the desired images from the surrounding area.
2. Description of the Related Art
The increasing complexity of our society and increasing level of the work performed creates stress in our daily lives, which can accumulate. This is now being treated as a social problem, with one method of relieving such stress being, for example, the viewing of commercially produced video tapes, which are effective in relaxing the heart, the spirit, and the nerves.
However, in using such video tapes, the image content is limited to that on the tape at the time of purchase, and one tires of it as the tape is viewed repeatedly.
In the field of electronic communications the widespread adoption of broadband ISDN (ATM communications) has created the expectation of a shift from the voice-based telephone of today to imaged-based TV telephones. In making this shift, it is expected that the TV telephone will be used to access video databases, making it easy to acquire images and sounds of the environment and of scenery, in what could be called an "environment data providing service."
However, even using this method, because the images and other information obtained from the above-noted image database are data which have been stored beforehand, and therefore is not live information, there is the problem of tiring of the information, for the reason mentioned above. In addition, in this case, a costly center facility would be required, leaving unsolved the technical problem of providing environmental images and natural sounds easily and at a low cost.